President Donald Trump and Robert Mueller are pictured in separate file photos. (AP)

Is the country on the cusp of a major executive privilege battle over access to the report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign? As speculation intensifies over the possible imminent release of the investigation report, President Trump surely is weighing options as to how he might force sections of the report from being disclosed to Congress and ultimately the public.

The guiding legal principle for presidential withholding of information from disclosure is executive privilege. Although nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, executive privilege has a long history in the U.S. going back to the George Washington administration. In the first dispute over whether a president may withhold from Congress requested information, the nation’s first President communicated to his Cabinet that the standard was that doing so was in the service of the public interest, not the political interest of the President. If merely to protect the President from political embarrassment, then there was no right to conceal information.

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The evolution of custom and of case law has affirmed the principle that executive privilege exists to protect the national interest, not the President’s. Governments have occasional secrecy needs and there are occasions when the disclosure of information about government operations would do real harm to the country. Usually such cases involve national security, but not always.

Looking at the current circumstance where the President surely will be tempted to shut down the release of embarrassing information in the Mueller Report, it is nearly impossible to fathom a legal justification for using executive privilege. Presidents are on especially weak grounds in claiming executive privilege in cases of allegations of wrongdoing.

That was the standard in the unanimous ruling of U.S. v. Nixon (1974), in which the Supreme Court affirmed that, although executive privilege is a legitimate presidential power, it operates with limits and in any investigation of wrongdoing the needs of criminal justice override any presidential claim to a right of secrecy. It is simply impossible for those with compulsory power — whether special prosecutors or members of Congress conducting investigations — to do their jobs without access to information.

To be clear, Mueller’s investigation has not been blocked by claims of executive privilege. But on the release of the report, Congress will be eager to review its findings and all of the evidence in full, especially should there be a finding of collusion. The President will be tempted to block Congress from getting its hands on the evidence and, if the attorney general will not do Trump’s bidding by himself blocking sections of the report, then a privilege claim appears likely.

Since U.S. v. Nixon, various federal courts have supported the right of congressional committees — when undertaking their investigatory function — to force the disclosure of documents or testimony. The position of Congress also is strengthened because the information sought is a report produced by the special counsel’s office in the Department of Justice (DOJ).

That is because executive privilege claims generally fall into two categories: the presidential communication privilege and the deliberative process privilege. The former gives the President greater latitude in keeping secret his communications with close advisors, and the latter provides protection against the release of pre-decisional documents or information within the executive branch. It is the deliberative process variety of an executive privilege claim that Presidents are on their weakest footing and especially so in the face of a criminal case or congressional inquiry into possible White House wrongdoing.

Therefore, if President Trump makes an executive privilege claim on the release of the special counsel report, it would not be a valid exercise of this power and must give way to the significant interest in the execution of justice either in the form of a criminal trial or a congressional investigation. In short, executive privilege cannot protect the president from any negative finding in the Mueller Report, and claiming that authority will only make it clear he has something very damaging to hide.

Rozell is dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of the book “Executive Privilege.” Sollenberger is professor of political science at University of Michigan-Dearborn and co-author of the book “The President’s Czars.”